Reviews

Various Artists

Mega-rock festival staged in Toronto in July 2003, where a bizarre line-up included The Isley Brothers, AC/DC, Justin Timberlake and The Rolling Stones. A voiceover drones on about how Toronto needed a "big idea" to restore its confidence after the city's SARS crisis, but this event is pretty average, and Timberlake's duet with Jagger on "Miss You" is, weirdly, the highlight.

Various Artists – Lost Blues Tapes: More American Folk Blues Festival 1963-65

Archive anthology of blues greats recorded on historic European visits

The Sound – The BBC Recordings

Treasures unearthed from '80s Beeb archives

Glenn Tilbrook – Transatlantic Ping Pong

Second solo album from former Squeeze man

Client – City

Second irony-heavy opus from leaders' wives

Toby Burke – Winsome Lonesome

Already Uncut-endorsed via two fine LPs as head of wistful country types Horse Stories, Burke's solo debut finds him in intimate, hushed repose. His acoustic guitar fingering is highly expressive, be it woven into delicate sound webs on the love-torn "Cigarettes", delving into the country-blues of "Long Face" or lighting up "Which Train's She On?" with flashes of slide. Burke's voice remains his crowning glory, though, wringing nuance from the simplest of melodies.

Finn De SièCle

The Crowded House siblings back together for the first time in nine years

Donnie Darko: The Director’s Cut

Limited theatrical re-release of modern classic ahead of forthcoming DVD special edition

Fear X

The ingredients are there: Nicolas Winding Refn (Pusher) directs John Turturro and James Remar in a (minimal) script by the late Hubert Selby Jr, with Eno scoring. Yet somehow this just doesn't gel as it wades through its slow pretensions. Turturro's a recently widowed security guard, obsessive over photos and CCTV as he seeks his wife's killer. Intelligent, but rather drab.

Train Of Thought

Wong Kar-Wai's quirky, impressionistic Hong Kong masterpiece reissued
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